B7667-100: Customer Centric Innovation

This course deals with the challenge of bringing to market elegant and efficient solutions to strong customer needs. This challenge is relevant whether you work for a startup or a large company, whether you sell products or services, and whether your customers are individual consumers or companies. We structure our learning around the following basic steps of the innovation process:

1. Opportunity identification / Idea generation

2. Design

3. Testing

4. Launch

We will take on the challenge of trying to develop a new product during the week! You will apply the tools and frameworks covered in the course to progress through the innovation process outlined above. A set of projects will be offered by companies. Alternatively, you may propose your own project (e.g., startup idea) - please contact the instructor before the end of February if you would like to do so.

Glaubinger Professor of BusinessOlivier Toubia is the Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia Business School. His research focuses on various aspects of innovation (including idea generation, preference measurement, and the diffusion of innovation), social networks and behavioral economics. He teaches a course on Customer-Centric Innovation and the core marketing course, in the MBA and Executive MBA programs. He received his MS in Operations Research and PhD in Marketing...